All of these episodes that are interested in kind of flipping places, trading places, people becoming opposite versions of themselves.

I mean, this is a real recurring theme in the show, right? There's the Bizarro World version of them.

This is a device that they use tons of times and I do think it goes right back to that thing of are we weird or are you weird and I think you know the kind of core of Jewish humor in America from the early 20th century up through the 60s and

70s and figures like Lenny Bruce and so on was always about the

inside outside this of Jews. You know Jews are obviously socially excluded

and discriminated against even you know pretty deep into the 20th century in lots of different environments and have a sense of their own our own otherness and that coexists in some kind of generative tension with the fact that like Jews aren't black right the

nature of Jewish whiteness is a kind of complicated and contested thing but like

Jews are not subject to the same kinds of systemic exclusion and discrimination as people of non-European descent in this country are.

And so I think if you think about that kind of in terms of social structure, right?

It gives Jewish people a kind of a fly-on-the-wall experience where you're both kind of in the room

with kind of normative white Americans often but you also feel like you're not really one of

them and so that lends itself to the kind of observational style.

What's the deal with?

Exactly.

The right to preoccupation with minutia.

But I think the problem that Seinfeld is then about

is like what happens to that sort of in between

that sort of in between place

is gradually disappearing, right,

when tangible, really clear anti-Semitism exists less and less. I mean,

none of the sun say there aren't forms of it, but it's, you know, as a kind of real obstacle in life is

diminishing when Jewish social upward mobility is kind of complete in a certain way and the kind of critical edge, even the kind of angry edge that made a lot of that earlier humor funny doesn't really have as much of a basis anymore.

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